I write about everything from raising capital to leading teams and acquiring customers, but I focus considerably on how founders can grow their businesses by seeking personal improvement first. Over the past few years, I have co-founded and managed companies in the e-commerce, data security and Chinese translation industries, and have worked as an investment professional in the Internet and digital media industry. Prior to that I served as an active duty soldier in the U.S. Army.

How Caring Less Will Make You More Productive

Ever notice how sometimes you do your best work when you don’t seem to care about the outcome, or that you can produce surprisingly good results despite not having slaved away until your brain or body literally gave out, exhausted from endless preparation and planning?

If you’re like me, you have plenty of evidence that it is possible to over-prepare, overwork and overthink, yet many of us continue to do so anyway because the notion of doing our best and working hard is so deeply ingrained into who we are. This is perhaps especially true of entrepreneurs. But I suppose that a lot of us don’t have truly enlightening realizations until we’ve gone too far, made mistakes, and hurt ourselves or other people.

Recognizing that the notion of caring less may seem to be a counterintuitive solution, I mean that being more productive requires us to be concerned less with what is irrelevant and more with what is truly important.

Care less about consequences and more about requirements. Sometimes it really is better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. I’d rather be a successful mercenary who was willing to break some rules than a failed idealist who was too afraid to take risk. Separately, this also means that sometimes the greatest leverage you have in a relationship (or negotiation) is simply caring less about the outcome—or in other words, not forcing yourself to strike a deal, only for the sake of reaching a deal, that consequently surpasses your reservation price or violates your beliefs.

Care less about perfection and more about completion. Instead of thinking about everything that you could or want to do, consider doing only what is good enough—to launch, to produce, to begin. The quicker you get something out there, the more you can accomplish and the faster you can learn. Accept the fact that you’ll make mistakes and embrace those future missteps as the best learning experiences of your life.

Care less about what’s around you and more about what’s inside you. I believe it’s true that developing your skills and building your products are best done when considering what it is that you want, not what others want you to do. When you love what you do, you tend to be better at it. And aren’t you less likely to fail—and more confident and able to take creative, calculated risk in the future—when you’re better at what you do?

Care less about what could go right and more about what could go wrong. Obviously, don’t be a pessimist. But do consider the major risks of your enterprises, strategies and actions. And plan for the possibility that those tragedies will strike. In his book, Great By Choice, Jim Collins makes the fantastic point that being productively paranoid allows us to avoid the fatal mistakes, which are nonrecoverable.

Care less about what is next and more about what is now. I love the concept of zen. And meditation. And mindfulness. I know next to nothing about them, but, to me, those concepts mean to ignore the distractions once on our productively paranoid paths. Or to simply ‘get ‘er done’, as I so often used to hear in the Army.

Care less about details all of the time and more about big picture some of the time. Continuously prioritize the major accomplishments you seek to produce, so that when you’re engrossed in the details of a project you also have an end point in mind. Thinking big picture also works in relationships: when you’re not arguing about or conflicting on insignificant comments, events and differences, you have more time to focus on why you began the relationship in the first place and what you hoped to gain from (and give to) it.

Care more about less

Caring less doesn’t mean being careless. It means caring more about fewer things; prioritizing what’s important and eliminating what isn’t; recognizing what’s good enough and what’s too much; concentrating your efforts, skills and attention; learning when to think, when to do and when to rest. Caring less, for me, is the root of lean thinking, for it results in less undue stress, waste, and error, and more learning, increased productivity and greater impact.

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